Driving now a little too free -- for all

Dave Ford

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, July 25, 2003

These are lazy days in San Francisco, just warm enough to shuck off the jacket but not hot enough to be driven to paying full retail.

One's thoughts lazily turn to the news, which informed us last week that an 86-year-old man plowed his car through two blocks of a Santa Monica farmers' market, killing 10, including a 3-year-old girl and a 7 1/2-month-old boy, and injuring at least 20 others.

I couldn't shake the tragedy for days. The man, George Russell Weller, apparently led a good life, contributing time and energy to his church and community. Then this. A decent life for 86 years, then winding up one day knowing you'll shuffle off this mortal coil with 10 lives on your head. Argh.

Knowing, too, the ripples emanating from each of those lives. "Honey, I'm just going to run down to the farmers' market -- be back in an hour." "Mom? Can you hear me now? We're in Santa Monica. We should be home by around 8, OK?" Double argh.

There followed, predictably, a lot of hoo-ing and ha-ing in the media about whether laws should be enacted preventing older folks from driving and encouraging increased testing.

Here's my thought. Why limit tests to wise elders? Let's require a driver's test every five years for everyone, beginning at age 16 and continuing until death, or poor eyesight, do us part from our car keys. After 70, make it every two or three years.

Driving skills, as the police will tell you, are perishable. San Francisco cops get retested every couple of years on tough courses. I suggest that the civilian driving test, while not requiring the ability to perform a skid-drift turn at 60 mph, would be just as tough. There should be special driver's exams for SUVs, light trucks and Humvees. Those failing the tests would be required to present a certified training school certificate before taking another test.

All this would be costly, requiring more DMV testing personnel, increased processing and paperwork, etc. I say, as a driver, pass the cost on to us, the vehicle wielders. Increase registration fees. What, you ask, about the economically challenged, including seniors on fixed incomes? Simple. Levy the cost based on income: The more someone earns, the more he or she pays. Everyone gets a fair shake, and those who have materially gained what society has to offer, gain the golden spiritual glow of giving some of it back.

Or we could raise taxes, something politicians would no doubt be thrilled to do, since it means standing up to the automobile industry lobby, the small- government-is-better groups and those who mistakenly assert that driving is a right. After all, politicians are strongly ethical statesmen and stateswomen driven by nothing but a desire to serve their constituencies and the state's greater good. (Ha ha. I said "driven.")

Incidentally, to say driving is a right is to truck in delusions. Driving is a privilege. Yes, yes, the Declaration of Independence says liberty is an inalienable right. No doubt some drivers construe that to include driving the open highway, the wind in one's hair and bugs asplatter on the running boards. Pshaw. One pays for one's privileges, as one should. (Ha ha. I said "truck.")

That problem dispensed with, we (that is, me and the voices in my head) turn our attention to a Washington Post story published late last week. It noted that, in the wake of ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman's story showing U.S. troops distraught about an extended tenure in Iraq, Internet gossip Matt Drudge reported being tipped by someone from the White House communications office that Kofman is openly gay. And Canadian. (A White House spokesman, according to the Post, disavowed knowledge of the tip.)

No matter the source of the charges, one can't help but wonder where this plays. I mean, Kofman, recently profiled in the gay newsweekly the Advocate, is openly gay.

So who cares? My guess is that the not-White House source passed this to Drudge hoping he'd run it. (He did, in a companion piece to the ABC News report about soldiers' unhappiness.) Thus media bottom-feeders could disseminate the information, and here I'm in no way referring to conservative talk radio hosts.

That's the only explanation. Unless it was planted by a not-White House source so stuck in the Cold War that he (or, to be fair, alas, she) felt a homophobic personal slur would do the same in 2003 as it would have in the hands of Sen. Joe McCarthy (whose chief aide, the oleaginous Roy Cohn, was, of course, homosexual, although in no apparent way gay). Ah, for the days of J. Edgar Hoover.

You can bet the non-White House source no longer has a job at the White House if the matter came to the attention of Vice President Dick Cheney, who likes White House leaks only slightly less than he likes, well, White House leaks.

Cheney, by the way, is 62. Yet he poses no threat on the American roadways, shuttled about as he is in a car paid for by the American taxpayers, although not so much by the wealthier ones, who, through the tax-relief ministrations of Cheney's boss, still light cigars with $1,000 bills while coughing all the way to Bimini.

Under my DMV plan, however, they'll set the rest of us up in driving exams for the next two centuries. We can therefore turn our attentions to more pressing matters, not dis-including goodies on the sale racks.